The restaurant sits snuggly on the quayside, just along from the MWM, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Boscastle is that kind of place. Appropriately, the village is only a 3.5-mile (5.6-km), Salt Path hike along the coast from Tintagel and exists in the same sort of mythical half-light of crystal gazing, Celtic revival wistfulness and Enya ballads. Except with added fisherfolk. And clotted-cream-fudge shops. But it’s the right side of twee with some of the original north Cornish enchantment still to be found hiding in the rock pools and scattered across cliffs that weep ferrous tears from open slate-quarried wounds.
You can get there easily enough by car from your West Country holiday rental or one of those rural buses that may or may not turn up every third Tuesday when the wind is in the west and the curator of the MWM has read the runes correctly. Once there, head down to the water’s edge close to where the benign-looking (but unpredictable) river mingles in slow, powerful eddies with the briny waters of the harbour. There you will find The Rocket Store’s jolly stone and timber shed (once home to the coastguard’s horse-drawn rocket-firing equipment) and equally jolly diners – out front or crammed inside – feasting away on Cornwall’s peerless local seafood and good-grass-fed meat.
Local is something of an understatement here: the fish coming ashore only metres away from a tiny fishing boat operated by someone’s dad using traditional fishing methods and proper concern for coastal fish stocks. All of which you can taste in the firm lobster tails and the lithe, pink-gilled mackerel that grace the menu. Just up the road, the Rocket team also has a regenerative farm that provides low-carbon-footprint lamb, ploughing profit back into the local economy and soil along the way.
We lunched outside at a dog-friendly scrubbed table sheltered from the penetrating peri-solstice sun by a welcome awning. We were handed a short menu and an enormous board was propped nearby, specials one side (off the boat/down from the hillside that morning) and a short, equally changing, wine list on the other. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they had just sold their last glass of the Full.Minant Kalkstein Riesling; it was a hot day with a lot of Riesling-friendly crustacea scuttling around. The waiter apologised and directed me to a William Fèvre Petit Chablis instead. We’ll charge you the (lower) Riesling price, she added. A nice touch and so I said, yes, please, though I wish I’d taken a punt on the orange Capçanes, Cap Sentit from Catalunya.
But things looked up when the first of the small plates/starters arrived (pictured below): gurnard ceviche with white soy sauce (shiro shoyu), fresh peas and elderflower. The latter was carefully confined to actual flower heads in the pickling liquor, foregrounding the wickedly fresh fish and the robust salty-savoury kick of the soy and its cod’s roe garnish. Grumpy-faced gurnard is not a fashionable fish but here the flesh is filigree, light, charming. And I make a mental note to eat more of it.
Next came a pair of plump, charred sardines (Cornish pilchards in fact, pictured below). They came with fermented green- and red-chilli sauces spiked with Thai fish sauce, so good that a spoon was needed to ladle up what remained once the perfectly cooked flesh had been fingered from the bones.
A small plate of handmade agnolotti (pictured below) came next with a sauce bursting with white- and black-pepper fragrance. Rich and peppery with brown and white crab meat the little parcels unexpectedly brought out the best in the Chablis, seasoning it and goading it into a largesse it didn’t really possess. More fermented goodness came in the shape of wild garlic fermented into a piquant savoury hum served with a lightly chilled beef tartare. A lovely bitter kale salad sat atop beetroot puree like an elegant reimagining of take-away crispy seaweed – all sesame-sequined crunch and oily joy.
We stuck to Chardonnay as the meal developed but headed south to Beaujolais for a deft Louis Jadot Chateau des Jacques Beaujolais Blanc Clos de Loyse. And the food continued to thrill. Crusty potatoes sitting on top of a delicious salsa verde (pictured below) hid masterful aioli beneath and were just made for grabbing, scooping, smearing, scoffing. A life-affirming, burnt-finger-tip experience of garlic silk, green pep and nubbly bits.
I see that my fat-thumbed notes, say ‘delicious mouse cheesecake’ which seems both unlikely and unwelcome. In reality, it was a plump quenelle of exemplary miso white-chocolate mousse, textured like clotted cream and enlivened by the nutty, bitter savouriness of a black-and-white sesame tuile. Its slight graininess read as cheesecake curds, dry and nicely salty with undercurrents of good West Country dairy beneath the white-chocolate gilding. We also opted for a rhubarb-topped Basque cheesecake (pictured below, in front of the mousse). What, beyond fashion, had occasioned its place on the menu I don’t know. It was the one culinary misstep on the menu: over-cooked, over-firm and mysteriously ‘over-here’.
But The Rocket Store is a great place to lunch, especially in the summer sun and with a bit of Cornish sand between your toes. Not cheap perhaps but if you’re willing to pay the necessary premium for just-off-the-boat, just-plucked-from-the-second-field-on-the-left, then worth every hair-raising country-lane mile to get to, for sure. And if neither solid Chardonnay, intriguing orange or absent Riesling appeal, go for their Hugo spritz – Prosecco lifted with mint and St-Germain elderflower perfume – that makes an unexpectedly good dancing partner to white fish.
Lunch for two with wine – £164.
The Rocket Store Boscastle Harbour, Cornwall PL35 0HD
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